This week in OtherWords, Fredric Rolando describes how letter carriers often serve their customers across the country in unexpected ways and Sam Pizzigati discusses how Utah’s distinction as one of the most economically equal states is fading.

The email called me “whorish” and the “strumpet of a carpetbagger.” It called my recent editorial about my grandfather “revolting.”

Hot damn. Really? I had just published a New York Times editorial about a painful incident during the Civil Rights movement in Danville, Virginia. My grandfather wrote a letter of protest to a judge who had doled out stiff sentences to Civil Rights protestors. Arrested for writing the letter, my grandfather served a bench warrant and was ridiculed and publicly humiliated in his small mill town.

In my article, I retraced the events. I meditated on some of what had been at stake for my grandfather, a white man, to speak out against the brutal violence and stark injustices faced by black protesters (and black people). I meditated about how my grandfather’s action both was and was not adequate protest to the era’s injustice. And I’d interviewed the minister who organized the protests, Lawrence Campbell, to see how he looked back on that time now.

My piece mostly got a warm reception. What surprised me was that this virulently sour note, in my inbox, had the power to make me feel—at least briefly— ill, angry, defensive, hurt, small. I felt singled out, threatened. Eventually I called some friends and laughed off the hurt. After all: The man was accusing me of tying Danville to this violent and unsavory history—yet he was the one calling me a carpbetbagger. Oh please. Dear sir, I regret to inform: It’s hard to escape history if you go around calling people strumpets.

As I thought about it more, however, it seemed to me that this reprimand – its unpleasantness, its rotten smell – was one of the mechanisms by which racism is maintained and one of the reasons white people stay quiet about racism. If we talk outside the bounds, we might get dinged.

Tess Taylor currently reviews poetry for NPR’s All Things Considered and teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book of poems, The Forage House, was released this month by Red Hen Press. She lives in El Cerrito, California. Tess will be reading from The Forage House at Sunday Kind of Love, Split This Rock‘s series in collaboration with Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC, January 19, 2014.

“Distributed generation with solar looks better and better to me all the time.” -James Woolsey, former director of the CIA.

What is a man with Woolsey’s credentials doing issuing a powerful endorsement of home solar panels? National security and sustainability, at face value, certainly make for an unlikely overlap of interests.

In his talk—delivered to a crowd of several hundred people at the Johns Hopkins Institute for International Studies—Woolsey advocated distributed solar energy in the form of solar panels on businesses and homes as one viable solution to the security challenges faced by America’s electricity grid.

The grid—the network of power plants, electrical substations, and transmission lines that deliver electricity around the country—is only one of 18 critical infrastructures in the U.S. However, all depend on electricity to function, making the stability of the grid vital to the running of each of these infrastructures.

Cyber threats are a particular threat to the national grid, in part because the control systems for the grid are all available online. Electrical infrastructure can also be severely damaged or disabled by large electromagnetic pulses, such as those caused by spontaneous electromagnetic bursts from the sun or by a nuclear attack. Woolsey noted that the grid is also vulnerable to attacks from, for instance, heavy artillery or ordinary gunfire.

Woolsey’s solutions to these threats are twofold. First, he suggested that individual shields should be constructed around every vital point on the energy grid to help protect these electrical hubs from attack—however, this would be undeniably resource-intensive and provide few benefits. Woolsey’s second—and more realistic—solution endorsed the idea of distributed generation and storage of renewable energy at the local level.

The logic behind the security argument for distributed solar is simple. When the energy needed to power each household and business is “coming from your roof… and being stored in the basement,” as Woolsey quipped, Americans are less vulnerable to disruptions in the production and transport system. The more energy produced locally on roofs and in yards, the less impact an extreme weather event or attack can have on the regular functioning of American society. Such resilience to external disruptions is key in an increasingly unpredictable energy, climate, and national security landscape.

There remain significant barriers to distributed solar energy, however. Although much of the technology for affordable distributed solar is “here or almost here,” according to Woolsey, funding for research and development is often uncertain. Further, it takes time for any new technology to be integrated into society. Attention must be given to state and national incentives for solar installation, integration with existing infrastructure, and other barriers to access if the market for distributed solar is to flourish across the United States.

Yet Woolsey’s endorsement of distributed solar energy as a security investment suggests the potential for more promising, creative national defense solutions—solutions that create resilient, productive domestic systems while working towards a more sustainable, renewable future.

This week in OtherWords, Sanjay Jolly describes the promising opportunities that a new wave of low-power FM stations will soon create, Jill Stein explains why she gave Bradley Manning a “presidential pardon,” and William A. Collins and I put the rash of newspaper purchases by billionaires into perspective.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a measure of final market value of goods/services produced by a country in a specific time period—nothing more, nothing less. It is easy, however, to fall under the misconception that GDP is a reliable indicator of economic growth or of a country’s well-being.

One of the core problems with GDP is that it only adds. That is, GDP calculates any kind of spending as improving the health of an economy—a limitation that is clearly problematic.

As an example, how does GDP account for an economic disaster? The oil spill British Petroleum (BP) caused in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 is a perfect example of the limitations of GDP. The transactions made to replace assets damaged or destroyed by such a disaster are not differentiated in final GDP scores, to the tune of about $20 billion in the 2010 oil spill.

Not to mention, an oil spill negatively affects the local economy in so many ways that GDP does not account for: for instance, fishermen losing their jobs and livelihood, restaurants temporarily closing or going out of business entirely, and tourism in the area rapidly declining. Moreover, the local ecosystem is completely thrown off balance and damaged, sometimes irreparably, for many years to come.

Hurricane Katrina provides another significant example of GDP’s limitations: With about $250 billion in cleanup costs, the hurricane’s effect on GDP certainly did not reflect the well-being of New Orleans citizens or economy in the years following the disaster. Thousands of former residents were permanently displaced, and the city is still struggling to approach pre-Katrina population figures. As of 2012, the city has reached only 80 percent of its former population.

Although Louisiana’s GDP initially dropped off after the disaster, as the cleanup effort began it quickly began to climb, approaching pre-disaster numbers within only five years. Yet while the state’s GDP was rapidly recovering, the city itself was not: Alyson Plyer, the chief demographer at the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, estimated in 2010 that the city was only “five years into a 10- to 20-year recovery project.” Going by GDP alone, however, the disaster seemed to be a hiccup rather than a monumentally disruptive catastrophe.

Economic disasters like the BP oil spill and Hurricane Katrina demonstrate the inherent limitations of GDP as a measurement of economic growth, health, or the well-being of citizens in an economy. GDP scores are simply not built to accommodate these negative externalities that affect people, wildlife, ecosystems, and communities.

However, alternative methods have been developed to more accurately account for these externalities. The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), developed by ecological economists in the 1980s and 90s, is much better equipped to measure activities that diminish financial and social well-being and negatively impact the environment. GPI, for instance, quantifies externalities such as ozone depletion or loss of wetlands as harmful costs—whereas GDP is not able to differentiate these harmful costs from positive economic activity so long as dollars are being spent.

Some states have already started to move away from GDP because of its inherent limitations: Despite early opposition, Maryland—in conjunction with the University of Maryland’s Center for Integrative Environmental Research—developed and implemented a GPI tool for policy-makers in early 2010. The tool, which measures how indicators of well-being interact with and affect each other, uses 26 different indicators from economic, environmental, and social categories to calculate GPI.

Maryland’s successful adoption of GPI will hopefully encourage other states to follow suit and develop similar measurements for a more sustainable economic future—one that values its citizens and the environment more highly than the dollar.

The Cold War is over
why aren’t we having fun
I have destroyed my internal Timex
kicked an innocent dog
stiffed four ratty beggars
my team has triumphed over
the incarnation of wickedness
I etch acrid sarcasm
on a child’s mind
can I pull a poem from shrapnel
fashion words of beauty
from shrill shrieks of falling bombs
submerge the laments of those
with investments
in times of need
the living need a poem

Across the country, people are picketing restaurants, calling corporate offices, and signing petitions against the fast food chain through August 11.

What’s this Week of Action against Wendy’s about? For years, the company has bucked industry trends and refused to cooperate with the Coalition of Immokalee Fair Food Program.

Grocery stores like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods have signed up already too.

StockMonkey.com/Flickr

Wendy’s complaint about the Fair Food Program is the proposed wage hike for farm workers — a whopping one cent per pound increase — that participating buyers would pay.

By refusing the pay bump, Wendy’s rejects a code of conduct that would dramatically improve labor conditions for Florida farmworkers. This code would prevent the neo-slavery conditions — forced labor without breaks, and without pay, in the hot sun — that dominate farms in the Sunshine State. The company’s management is also rejecting the complaint registry system, where workers could call out supervisors for breaking that code.

Perhaps most importantly, by snubbing the Fair Food Program, Wendy’s says no to the worker-to-worker education program. This program, which Wendy’s apparently believes to be non-essential, would inform workers of their right to water on the job, to a lunch break in the shade, and to report the all too frequent cases of sexual assault at their workplace.

The Fair Food Program is absolutely necessary to prevent the abuse of farm workers in Florida, a real danger highlighted by the discovery earlier this summer of 275 men, women, and teenagers held as forced laborers in horrifying conditions at a tomato processing factory in Mexico.

The United States government formally abolished slavery in 1865. Wendy’s should do its part to really end this terrible practice in our country.

Kathleen Robin Joyce is a student at Georgetown University and an OtherWords intern at the Institute for Policy Studies. OtherWords.org

This week in OtherWords, Bob Lord explains why cutting IRS spending is counter-productive and Jill Richardson weighs in on the government’s latest efforts to do something about food safety. Sam Pizzigati is still taking some time off.

The Bully Party / Donald KaulThis sure isn’t the representative democracy the Founders were after.

Beefing Up Food Safety / Jill RichardsonThe government’s new effort to strengthen its weak inspection system for imported food isn’t going to cover everything we eat from foreign countries.

Steve Cohen, Meet Al Capone / Jim HightowerMore than 80 years after the big-time mobster got busted for tax evasion, the feds may bar a cocky hedge fund manager from trading for his “failure to supervise.”

Just Follow the Oil / Emily Schwartz Greco and William A. CollinsWashington’s fuss over Iran has more to do with its natural gas and oil reserves than anything else.

Despite the reproductive rights uprising inspired by Wendy Davis’ heroic filibuster, lame-duck Texas Governor Rick Perry has continued his anti-choice rampage. By signing a contentious measure into law, Perry has made it much more difficult for Texan women — particularly poor and rural women whose ability to travel is limited — to access safe and legal abortions.

Not only does the law ban abortions four weeks earlier than the standard set by Roe v. Wade, it also imposes arbitrary and expensive regulations on clinics, putting all but five of the state’s 42 abortion providers in danger of closing permanently.

Five. In the entire state of Texas, which is roughly the size of Florida, New York, Idaho, South Carolina, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Rhode Island combined. Home to roughly 13 million women,Texas may soon have only five clinics at which those women can get an abortion.

The new Texas law is bound to ruin — or end — the lives of women whose only crime was being born in Texas.

But conservative Texan state lawmakers aren’t satisfied with the damage they’ve already done. That new law looks like a memo from Planned Parenthood compared with what is effectively a total abortion ban Representative Phil King (R-TX) recently introduced in the Texas House.

This new proposition would ban all abortions, except in the case of immediate medical emergency, after the detection of a fetal heartbeat. That can happen as early as six weeks after fertilization.

Most women don’t even realize they’re pregnant that soon. Doctors often use the detection of a heartbeat to determine the very existence of a pregnancy. King’s House Bill 59 can’t be allowed to become law in Texas. The risk to women, and to their families, is too great.

mirsasha/Flickr

The six-week ban has reared its ugly head before — a federal judge thankfully shut the whole thing down before it could go into effect in North Dakota. Judge Daniel Hovland denounced the ban as “an invalid and unconstitutional law,” based on the precedent set by Roe v. Wade. The law is against the anti-choice lobby on this ban. Hopefully, the same will hold true in the Lone Star State.

State Representative Harold Dutton, Jr. proposes an intriguing potential dam against the rising tide of anti-choice legislation. Dutton, a Democrat, introduced the Abortion Law Moratorium Bill, also known as House Bill 45, which presents so-called pro-lifers with a challenge: The state would have its draconian abortion restrictions, but only after it bans the death penalty.

If all life should be protected, the reasoning goes, the state has no business executing prisoners. If Texas is so “pro-life,” then why does it lead the nation in state-sponsored executions, with over 500 of them since 1976? More than half of those 500+ took place under the trigger-happy Perry.

Dutton’s bill isn’t going anywhere — he’s introduced it before with no luck. But the message he’s sending anti-choice legislators brings into sharp relief the cognitive dissonance of the phrase “pro-life,” which can be deadly for some women. And he’s laying bare the hypocrisy of being anti-choice and pro-death penalty.

Kathleen Robin Joyce is a student at Georgetown University and an OtherWords intern at the Institute for Policy Studies. OtherWords.org